Beliefs and Action

Many of us take for granted a picture of the relationship between our ideas and our behaviour, which looks something like this:

BELIEFS ⇒ ACTION

According to this image, beliefs are primary. We first have to decide ‘what we believe’, often in the form of statements, perhaps such as ‘There is that of God in everyone’. Our task is then to ‘put these beliefs into practice’, and our integrity is to be judged by the degree to which our actions conform to our stated beliefs.

This image is so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is just one way of making sense of our experience. It is useful for some purposes, but is not the only way to understand what is going on. It foregrounds the role of explicit belief statements, but it also obscures some things that are especially important for the Quaker way.

The early Quakers insisted that they were not offering just another set of beliefs, like all the other competing religious sects of their day. Instead, they were pointing to the possibility of a new experience of divine guidance and transformation. The way to that experience was not a different belief but a different practice, of ‘waiting in the Light’ or ‘returning within’. This was a deliberate process of silent, attentive waiting on the divine voice within; becoming sensitive to the leadings of the Inward Guide and acting on them, as individuals and as a Quaker community.

Our usual picture above of ‘putting beliefs into action’ does not serve us very well for making sense of Quaker practice. This is one reason why Friends struggle with the question ‘what do Quakers believe?’ which starts from the assumption that the Quaker way is defined by a set of beliefs rather than shared practices. In response, Friends often substitute ‘Quaker values’ for beliefs, but this usually involves keeping the same basic picture, according to which we first choose our values and then have to find ways to ‘live them out’.

VALUES ⇒ ACTION

Without an alternative to this simple, binary picture, we keep turning the Quaker way into just another set of arbitrary beliefs or values, words or ideas in our heads that we have to try somehow to live up to by acting them out in the world. But there are many other possibilities for picturing how our ideas relate to our actions. Just one example might be to imagine a circular process something like this:

Quaker practices include Meeting for Worship, Business Meetings, Experiment with Light, Meetings for Clearness, Worship sharing etc. These are not just forms of behaviour. Practices are an intimate combination of actions, ideas, stories and values. They embody shared expectations: for example that spoken ministry will be short, reflective, and generally avoid violent expressions of feeling. Quaker practices also refer to particular stories and traditions. Spoken ministry in a Meeting for Worship or Business will often refer to incidents from Quaker history or a particular Meeting community. These shared stories are part of the texture of Quaker practices, which contribute to their distinctive character.

Quaker practices give rise to very specific kinds of experience, including distinctive ones such as ‘quaking’ or the feeling of being ‘led’ to speak or act in a certain way. These experiences are significantly different from what happens in apparently similar practices such as Buddhist meditation. Quaker practices also shape our experience of being a particular kind of person. They help to form the things we value, what we enjoy or avoid, the kind of speech and behaviour that we cultivate. Practices such as Meeting for Worship for Business involve the regular self-discipline of letting go of fixed intentions and listening for the insights of those who differ from us. Through regular experience of disciplines such as this we are formed as people with distinctive capacities. This is one of the principal goals of Quaker practices, to help us to become changed men and women, to ‘feel the evil weakening in us and the good raised up’.

These kinds of experience, and the kind of people we become, inevitably shape the quality of our Quaker community. Quaker practices are not just individual exercises: it is central to the Quaker way that it is practised in, and builds up, a faithful community. The quality of our community relationships is crucial for the vitality of our collective Quaker practices. Where a Quaker meeting does not have strong relationships of trust and affection between its members, or where there is little practical agreement about how to worship or discern together, the quality of Quaker practice will be significantly weakened. A community in which people share their lives and experience, and where there is a high level of agreement about how to practise the Quaker way together, will enjoy a virtuous circle of deepening experience, community and practice.

This picture of practice, experience and community might also be helpful for understanding Quaker testimony as a practice rather than a list of values or principles ‘in our heads’. Quaker testimonies such as opposing war, solidarity with refugees or simplifying lifestyle are forms of purposeful, meaningful action, that form us as individuals and as a community. They are continually re-shaped by new discernment and understood in a range of different ways. Testimonies are not just acts of individual conscience, but practised as part of a community tradition, in conversation with its collective discernment.

I have presented this circular model of Quaker practice, experience and community not as ‘the truth’, but simply to illustrate one alternative to the prevailing model of ‘belief and action’, which too often tends to push people into opposing identities on the basis of differing statements of belief. All three parts of this alternative model include values, expectations, goals, ideas and stories, but it does not require us to decide or agree on theological positions. Perhaps I am drawn to this approach because explicit statements of belief play a very small role in my own life. I have always struggled to understand the meaning or purpose of abstract convictions about the nature of God or the precise mechanisms of salvation. For me, religion is not a matter of ‘beliefs’; it is concerned with what I trust in and what I do.

How do you understand Quaker practice, experience and belief?